The first of these was William Molyneux, the “Ingenious Molyneux,” as he was called by his contemporaries, a distinguished philosopher, whose life was almost exclusively devoted to scientific pursuits.  Molyneux is, or ought to be, a very interesting figure to any one who cares, even slightly, about Ireland.  He was one of the chief founders of the Philosophical Association in Dublin, which was the parent both of the present Dublin Society and of the Royal Irish Academy.  He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a friend of John Locke, with whom he constantly corresponded.  Both his letters, and those of his brother, Dr. Thomas Molyneux, show the most vivid and constant interest in everything connected with the natural history of Ireland.  Now it is a moving bog, which has scared the natives in its neighbourhood out of their senses; now, again, some great find of Irish elks, or some tooth of a mammoth which has been unearthed, and it is gravely discussed how such a “large-bodied beast” could have been transported over seas, especially to a country where the “Greeks and Romans never had a footing,” and where therefore the learned Mr. Camden’s theory, that the elephants’ bones found in England were the remains of those “brought over by the Emperor Claudius,” necessarily falls to the ground.  Both the brothers Molyneux belong to a band of Irish naturalists whose numbers are, unfortunately, remarkably limited.  Why it should be so is not easily explained, but so it is.  When Irish archaeology is mentioned, the names of Petrie, of Wilde, of Todd, of Graves, and, last but not least, of Miss Margaret Stokes spring to the mind.  Irish geologists, with Sir Richard Griffiths at their head, show as good a record as those of any other country, but the number of Irish naturalists whose fame has reached beyond a very narrow area is small indeed.  This is the less accountable as, though scanty as regards the number of its species, the natural history of Ireland is full of interest, abounding in problems not even yet fully solved:  the very scantiness of its fauna being in one sense, an incentive and stimulus to its study, for the same reason that a language which is on the point of dying out is often of more interest to a philologist than one that is in full life and vigour.

This, however, is a digression, and as such must be forgiven.  Returning to the arena of politics, Molyneux’s chief claim to remembrance rests upon a work published by him in favour of the rights of the Irish Parliament in the last year but one of the seventeenth century, only seven years therefore after the treaty of Limerick.

As one of the members of the Dublin University he had every opportunity of judging how the grasp which the English Parliament maintained by means of the obsolete machinery of Poynings’ Act was steadily throttling and benumbing all Irish enterprise.  In 1698 his famous remonstrance, known as “The Case of Ireland being bound by Act of Parliament made in England,” appeared, with a dedication to King William.  It at once created an immense sensation, was fiercely condemned as seditious and libellous by the English Parliament, by whom, as a mark of its utter abhorrence, it was condemned to be burned by the common hangman.